CISA Adds Another 95 Flaws to its Actively Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)
this week added 95 more security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities
Catalog^[1], taking the total number
of actively exploited vulnerabilities to 478.

“These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for
malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal
enterprise,” the agency said^[2]
in an advisory published on March 3, 2022.

Of the 95 newly added bugs, 38 relate to Cisco vulnerabilities,
27 for Microsoft, 16 for Adobe, seven impact Oracle, and one each
corresponding to Apache Tomcat, ChakraCore, Exim, Mozilla Firefox,
Linux Kernel, Siemens SIMATIC CP, and Treck TCP/IP stack.

Included in the list are five issues discovered in Cisco RV
routers, which CISA notes are being exploited in real-world
attacks. The flaws, which came to light^[3]
early last month, allow for the execution of arbitrary code with
root privileges.

Three of the vulnerabilities – CVE-2022-20699, CVE-2022-20700,
and CVE-2022-20708 – are rated 10 out 10 on the CVSS rating scale,
enabling an attacker to inject malicious commands, elevate
privileges to root, and run arbitrary code on vulnerable
systems.

CVE-2022-20701 (CVSS score: 9.0) and CVE-2022-20703 (CVSS score:
9.3) are no different in that they could allow an adversary to
“execute arbitrary code elevate privileges, execute arbitrary
commands, bypass authentication and authorization protections,
fetch and run unsigned software, or cause a denial of service,”
CISA added.

Cisco, for its part, previously acknowledged that it’s “aware
that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for several of the
vulnerabilities.” Additional nature of the attacks or the threat
actors that may be weaponizing them is unknown as yet.

To reduce the significant risk of the vulnerabilities and
prevent them from being used as a vector for potential
cyber-attacks, federal agencies in the U.S. are mandated to apply
the patches by March 17, 2022.

The development comes shortly after Cisco released patches for
critical security vulnerabilities^[4] affecting Expressway
Series and Cisco TelePresence Video Communication Server (VCS) this
week that could be exploited by a malicious party to gain elevated
privileges and execute arbitrary code.